


Down the Path of Good Intentions

by Ramzes



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Canon divergence - Rhaegar won, Don't copy to another site, Gen, character exploration, not for lyanna fans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-13 15:40:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20584931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ramzes/pseuds/Ramzes
Summary: Lyanna Stark wanted to be good to Rhaegar, good to her family, good to her new subjects and even good to Elia Martell. Alas, life has this manner of taking people's wishes and turning them to clay - and shaping them into something new, entirely.





	Down the Path of Good Intentions

She wanted to be a good wife.

But that was before she realized what being a good wife meant to Rhaegar. It meant a dutiful lady wife. Someone who stood by him and reflected his light, instead of shining with her own. It meant listening to petitioners every day and sewing for the poor, although her clumsy fingers often got pricked by that horrible needle. Conforming her every word and even her attire with occasion, event, people’s opinion. Being seen to go the Great Sept and kneel in front of the altars, as if she would ever pray to the Seven! This was the first betrayal Rhaegar committed against her.

“But you told me it was fate,” she protested the first time. “That I was to you what Betha Blackwood was to King Aegon. She, too, worshipped the old gods and he never stopped her in this or made her pretend that she believed in the Seven.”

“Betha had been his wife for over a decade when he was crowned,” Rhaegar explained with this exaggerated patience that she had come to hate. She clasped her hands because the urge to fly at him and claw at his face was almost overwhelming. “And she was… traditional in every other way. We must make some sacrifices, Lyanna. There was a war mere months ago…”

But to Lyanna, it looked that she was the only one who was expected to make any sacrifices. Little by little, he demanded of her to stifle everything that had thrilled him about her in the beginning – what was good enough for a lady love was not appropriate for a lady wife, Lyanna came to realize quite belatedly. Sure, sometimes he would surprise her by telling that she could spend the entire afternoon riding but even this felt like opening the door of a cage whenever he decided. He no longer thought of just one thing – to please her. And while she understood that it had been foolish of her to have expected this, it still hurt – especially when he expected of her all things that she had scoffed at and had been as naïve as to tell him that she did. He had never told her a word that would have made her aware of his true expectations. Over time, she realized that he had never taken these declarations seriously, that he had expected that she would just grow out of them. That perhaps she would start liking spending a big part of her week with the royal seamstresses! But she still tried and suffered his silent disapproval of her failure in silence – she was too proud to cry and she would never debase her by asking for help about all the things that she had so skillfully avoided being taught at the time.

* * *

She wanted to be a good queen.

But that was before she realized that the stain of what she had done, of what Rhaegar had done would sully them forever – and it would sully her much more than him. So many people had died! So many women were left widowed, with hungry mouths to feed. She had entered King’s Landing in the wake of a pyre – and she had entered her marriage in the wake of a woman who was still recovering from giving birth to Rhaegar’s child. No woman would ever show mercy on her – peasant women saw her like a vile seductress, the kind each of them feared; highborn ladies whispered behind their hands, their malice going even stronger at the idea that a Lyanna Stark might be installed in their own homes, her children placed in the very nurseries where their trueborn children were playing, to endanger them and shame their mothers for all to see… She could find no woman with interests matching hers and certainly could not form a circle of her own to talk of poetry and long-dead wise masters. This was Elia Martell’s forte; after such a gathering which happened at least one week, the court fluttered around, excited and eager to hear what these smart people had come up with.

It seemed that justice wasn’t Lyanna’s forte either. More than once, she intervened on matters that seemed clear-cut to her, only to have Rhaegar shake his head in public and reproach her in private that she was meddling in things she did not have the knowledge or experience to understand. “You can’t address every justice with your sword, Lyanna,” he said and while in the beginning, she had heard the reason behind it, over time she started only hearing the words – or rather, part of them. _You can’t, you can’t, you can’t…_

* * *

She wanted to be a good daughter, a good sister. She truly believed that in time, her father would understand that this was the best for House Stark as well. Surely, there would be some uncomfortable explanations to Robert but after a while, her father would see how much better it was for House Stark to have a queen for a daughter, a grandson in the succession. She was most sincere about her House’s best interest. Instead, she got a dead father, one dead brother and two who would not talk to her unless absolutely forced to. House Stark bore the mockery of all Great Houses and the resentment of its own bannerman. It looked that there was not a single northern House that had not lost a son at her father’s arrival at the Red Keep… Lyanna only came to realize the true extent of northern losses when the entourage from her homeland that she was bound to have as a queen came in tiny numbers and containing none of the men and women she had welcomed to Winterfell or visited with her father. These were people gathered from the least significant Houses to save face and even they were too few. No one wanted to serve her.

* * *

She wanted to be good to Elia Martell but of course, Rhaegar’s promise about this turned to ashes as well. Elia did not get used to Lyanna over time. Her unfailing politeness was in sharp contrast with the way she treated petitioners, the kindness she showed the frightened girls loaded in wheelhouses and dumped on her door as part of her court by their families who could afford no decent dowry but did not want to rein in their pride and wed their daughters to merchants or bankers. Each one of them received personal attention, a soft word, a discreet direction by Rhaegar’s first queen until they found their feet at court. Many of them made good matches with the help of Elia’s favour and purse. But she was never this way towards Lyanna. She never appeared when Rhaegar and Lyanna broke their fast – in the first years, they had done it every day and Rhaegar had always invited Elia. She always found reasons to decline Lyanna’s own invitations to her chambers, too, usually pleading bad health, although only in an hour, she would be talking animatedly with the septas from who know what orphanage. And when Lyanna complained to Rhaegar, feeling that he had been very wrong in his assessment, he was quick to assure her that Elia would come round, given time. “We should not harass her,” he always finished but over time, Elia started letting him near, although Lyanna doubted this near included her bedchamber.

She never let Lyanna through the glass wall of her private life. And as Lyanna watched her go through the halls in her magnificent dresses and complementing jewels, surrounded by people striving for her favour, often with her brother Oberyn when he visited, Lyanna felt shameful, bitter resentment because it seemed that her onetime pity for the poor weak Dornish woman who could not even keep the love of her handsome husband had been quite misplaced.

Now, they were in the same boat… Because it was clear that Lyanna would not give Rhaegar his Visenya either. And unlike Elia, she had nothing else to offer – no alliance, no help, no shared interests. Nothing but regrets that seemed to grow bitterer by the day and the ghost of a love she had failed to keep alive as early as the first few years of their marriage – and the memories and ghosts that both of them would rather forget!

Even their love for Rhaegar could not bring them together because neither felt it. Lyanna thought that Elia might have a lover and she envied her this – the ability to feel love. The only love that had remained in her own life was her son.

* * *

She wanted to give her boy everything and Rhaegar dealt her the cruelest blow of all when she realized that he had no such intention. “But why?” she asked. “It isn’t as if you don’t have another seat! You could restore Summerhall – it was the seat Daeron II gave to his youngest son, so it won’t be a precedent…”

“Maekar was sent there to keep the balance between the Reach, the stormlands and Dorne,” Rhaegar replied. “Jaehaerys’ very presence will be an insult to Storm’s End and Dorne. And don’t tell me to just build another castle,” he added before she could. “We’ve barely achieved some balance. I won’t allow any rumours that I’m favouring one of my sons at the expense of the other.”

“Isn’t this what you’re going?” Lyanna spat as the truth finally dawned upon her: as much as Rhaegar loved their son, he saw him as the spare to his heir. A second best. Lyanna had never wished for a throne for her son but she had never expected such lack of concern either.

As soon as she returned to her chambers, she sat down with some ink and parchment. She did not know where to start from. Ned would not help her and neither would Robert or Jon Arryn. But Hoster Tully… no, she did not have a daughter to offer to his son and she could hardly offer Elia’s!

_It doesn’t matter,_ she thought. _For now, I’ll establish connections._ _Over time, things will clear out in my mind. _She remembered the embroideries Elia’s ladies prided themselves on, the needles creating the patterns a stitch by stich. I will sew a kingship, Lyanna thought and shivered, feeling the weight of all her thwarted desires lift itself from her shoulders and settle into a solid new purpose.


End file.
